WHO'S SCHOOLIN' WHO?

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IS OBAMA USING GATES TO TAKE THE BLAME?

OR IS OBAMA BEING PLAYED BY THE HAWKS?



Either Way, The Permanent Government Wins Again, Not Us, The Idiots Who Voted For Obama

Less than a year ago, a few of us got interested in this young black guy from Chicago that said he was against war and torture and stuff like that. We backed him up, sent him money, worked for his campaign for free, and helped him convince everybody else that he would quickly end the war and stop the torture if he got elected. We all worked our asses off to get him elected. When he won, of course we celebrated. It just seemed like such an earth-shaking, bad-old-days ending, wonderfully historic event. It was the first good thing to happen in politics in forty, almost fifty years. The bad guys had finally been defeated: The racists, the plutocrats, the sexists, the corporatista's, the homophobes, the fascists, the religious fanatics, the gun-nuts, the blue-noses, the torturers, the war-heads, maybe even the whole military-industrial-oil complex. We thought we could finally change the national security state, and start living in a better, saner, cleaner, more free, more abundant, more peaceful world.

AAAAAAANNNNNGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!! Wrooooong answer!

Obama has now re-appointed the Torturer-In-Chief, Bush's own Secretary of Defense, Gates. This is the guy who pretended that the "surge" had worked magic all by itself, and then took credit for it. He helped create the mess in Afghanistan in the 80's, helped set up training camps there later used by the 9/11 bombers while at CIA & NSA, and then walked away and let the Taliban take over, hosts to Bin Laden. Now he lets those same bombers, aka Al Qaida, run loose in Pakistan. He also traded Iran weapons for hostages, paid for by smuggling drugs from Columbia through Panama to the U.S. to also fund the Contras in Nicaragua, against Congressional restrictions, an off-the-books, illegally funded "covert" operation that everybody found out about. A career f*ck-up, in other words, and a criminal. And this is the guy who kept Gitmo open, supervised the water-boarding, and helped invent the practice of "extraordinary rendition" of prisoners of war, terror suspects, or anybody we didn't like, to places where they could safely be tortured, to death if necessary. This is a man whom Obama should be indicting. Instead, he is nominating him to his Cabinet. As they say on the Internets, What The F*ck?!?!?!

Yeah, maybe it's all part of some grand master plan. Maybe Obama is just the most subtle political mind since Machiavelli. But he's up against the worst people on Earth, and he seems to be succumbing to them. If he has any real stuff left, he'd better start using it. His only real hope, assuming he ever was one of us, is us. If he continues to alienate us, the people who voted for him, he will have nothing but his coterie of corporatist controllers. And they don't need him one second longer than we are willing to support him for.

Tick tock, Barack. It's damned near finished time to put up or shut up, time we moved on so we can start organizing for a REAL agent of change. You're not even in the White House yet, and you've already sold us out. At least, that's how it looks. If you're going to surprise us, and those closet-Nazi's you're surrounding yourself with, you'd better do it soon.


YAHOO NEWS
"Obama picks graybeards as wartime Cabinet"
The door doesn't even revolve any more. Just the Presidents.

' Obama's insurgent candidacy was founded on his opposition to the Iraq war and a promise to end it, fast. But with a crushing global financial crisis supplanting Iraq as Job One, the Democrat has turned to the very man running the Iraq and Afghan wars for the current Republican president, officials confirmed to The Associated Press. Gates, who has served as President George W. Bush's defense secretary for two years, will remain in the Cabinet for some time, probably a year, according to an official familiar with discussions between him and the president-elect. His appointment would fulfill an Obama pledge to include a Republican in his Cabinet. The 65-year-old climbed the CIA bureaucracy from an entry-level position to become director under President George H.W. Bush. He also served on his National Security Council, as he had for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Gates helped lead U.S. efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s while at the CIA and was deputy national security adviser during Operation Desert Storm, the first U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Gates is a close friend of the Bush family. He was interim dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M and became the university's president in 2002. The school is home to the elder Bush's presidential library. '

NY TIMES
"Meet the New Boss …"
Same as the old boss? He IS the old boss!

' As someone who was skeptical of Obama’s moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain. (Jim Jones is an old friend of McCain’s, and McCain almost certainly would have asked Gates to stay on as well.) This all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign. His appointments suggest that, if anything, his administration will have a Reapolitiker, rather than a liberal, bent, although Clinton and Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for “neo-liberalism” which is not so different in many respects from “neo-conservativism”. Both, for instance, support humanitarian interventions in places like Darfur and Bosnia. '

WIKIPEDIA
"ROBERT GATES: Level of involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal"
The man knows how to cover his ass.

' Because of his senior status in the CIA, Gates was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran-Contra Affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. In 1984, as deputy director of CIA, Gates advocated that the U.S. initiate a bombing campaign against Nicaragua and that the U.S. do everything in its power short of direct military invasion of the country to remove the Sandinista government [14]. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment of Gates for his Iran-Contra activities or his responses to official inquiries. Gates consistently testified that he first heard on October 1, 1986, from Charles E. Allen, the national intelligence officer who was closest to the Iran initiative, that proceeds from the Iran arms sales may have been diverted to support the Contras. Other evidence proves, however, that Gates received a report on the diversion during the summer of 1986 from DDI Richard Kerr.[15] The issue was whether the Independent Counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Gates was deliberately not telling the truth when he later claimed not to have remembered any reference to the diversion before meeting with Allen in October. '

WIKIPEDIA
"Iran-Contra affair"
Some history this guy has! If it stinks, he had it on his shoes.

' The Iran-Contra affair was a political scandal which was revealed in November 1986 as a result of earlier events during the Reagan administration. It began as an operation to increase U.S.-Iranian relations, wherein Israel would ship weapons to a moderate, politically influential group of Iranians opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini; the U.S. would reimburse Israel for those weapons and receive payment from Israel. The moderate Iranians agreed to do everything in their power to achieve the release of six U.S. hostages, who were being held by Hezbollah. The plan eventually deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages, without the direct authorization of President Ronald Reagan.[1][2] Large modifications to the plan were conjured by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985. In North's plan, a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[3] President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause and many believe he knew about the illegal transaction.[4] [1][2][5] After the weapon sales were revealed in November 1986, Ronald Reagan appeared on national television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the United States did not trade arms for hostages.[6] The investigation was compounded when large volumes of documents relating to the scandal were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials.[7] On March 4, 1987, Reagan returned to the airwaves in a nationally televised address, taking full responsibility for any actions that he was unaware of, and admitting that "what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."[8] '

SALON
"John Kerry, the man who uncovered Iran-Contra"
Drugs for guns, guns for drugs, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Gates was there.

' Kerry surrounded himself on his staff with tough, intelligent and independent-minded investigators, and he ordered them to follow the trail. In south Florida, they found men accused of drug running who were shipping guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and claiming to have been instructed to do so by the National Security Council. They tracked down a Contra advisor in Costa Rica known as "Colonel Flaco," who had evidence that North was involved in financing the Contras with Colombian drug money. The path led further to Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and to Saudi funding sources. Kerry won support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to launch an official investigation in large part because of the drug aspect. (Since Vietnam, concerned about the destructive heroin addiction of many veterans, Kerry had keenly followed the geopolitics of drugs and CIA complicity.) '

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